Frontline

Clip 2: ‘Elephants’

Taken from the documentary Frontline (1979)

Original title classification not known – this clip chosen to be M

Curator’s clip description

Neil Davis talks about working with the South Vietnamese army. He recalls that they were involved in fighting much more than the American forces, and suffered correspondingly higher casualties. The Americans were referred to as ‘elephants’ because of their extensive equipment and circus like approach to war. We see some of Davis’s footage of South Vietnamese soldiers fighting, and footage of American soldiers being interviewed during a battle.

Curator’s notes

Davis clearly had very sympathetic memories of the South Vietnamese troops he worked with. His comments comparing them with the American troops are nicely illustrated by juxtaposing his footage of them fighting with footage of the heavily laden and armoured American soldiers.

Damien Parer, curator

Teachers’ notes

provided by The Le@rning Federation

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This clip shows an interview with Neil Davis about his experiences as an Australian combat cameraman during the Vietnam War. The clip opens with Davis stating that the South Vietnamese Army always did more of the fighting than the US troops. The clip cuts to footage of South Vietnamese soldiers in combat as Davis’s voice-over praises their fighting capabilities. Davis comments that the Americans were called ‘the elephants’ because they could be heard coming with their tanks, noise and heavy equipment. There is footage of young US soldiers being interviewed during combat.

Educational value points

The Vietnam War was a contrast between the military might of US troops on the one hand and the lightly equipped Vietcong guerillas and North Vietnamese Army on the other. As reported by Neil Davis in this clip, the South Vietnamese soldiers did not have much respect for the US soldiers, calling them ‘elephants’ due to the sound they made moving through the jungle. More than 3 million US servicemen fought in the Vietnam War, which ended in the victory of North Vietnam.

The Vietnam conflict (1954–75) stemmed from the war for Vietnamese independence from the colonial French, and then from 1959 became a civil war between communist-led North Vietnam and South Vietnam, supported by some democratic countries. The USA and Australia became involved in the Vietnam War in a bid to ‘contain’ communism in South-East Asia, viewing the defence of South Vietnam as a crucial part of the Cold War between the communist states of Russia and China and the democracies of the world.

The Vietcong was the name of the guerilla force that, with the North Vietnamese Army, fought against South Vietnam. Vietcong personnel were mostly recruited in South Vietnam and received military aid and training from the North Vietnamese Army. They fought a guerilla war of ambush and sabotage and mostly controlled the countryside rather than the cities. They were referred to as ‘VC’ or ‘Charlie’ by Australian and US troops.

Neil Davis (1934–85) was one of Australia’s most respected combat cameramen and war correspondents, filming and reporting on the Vietnam War from 1964 to 1975. His coverage of the Vietnam War was unusual in that he chose to film the War from a South Vietnamese rather than a US perspective and he was interested in the effects of war and combat on individuals. In 1985 he was killed while filming a coup in Bangkok, Thailand.

The South Vietnamese Army, known as the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), fought against the North Vietnamese Army and the Vietcong during the Vietnam War from 1956 to the fall of Saigon in 1975. Neil Davis states in this clip that the South Vietnamese troops, rather than the US troops, bore the brunt of the conflict. There were 224,000 South Vietnamese troops killed in the War.

This clip is taken from the film Frontline, a documentary by David Bradbury on Neil Davis’s 11-year experience covering the Vietnam War. The film was called Frontline because Davis chose to work in the front-line battle areas with the South Vietnamese Army as it was their War, about which they cared very much and which they fought on their own terms. He believed that the South Vietnamese were good fighters looked down upon by the USA and its allies and wrongly blamed for the losses experienced in the War.

Media coverage of the Vietnam War was unrestricted, unlike that of the First and Second World Wars, where there was government censorship of war footage shown to the public. Television brought the horror of war into the living rooms of the USA and Australia, contributing to the War’s increasing unpopularity with the public, which led to increasingly large antiwar protests and the withdrawal of US and Australian troops from the conflict.

The young US soldiers, mostly conscripts, who are interviewed in this clip are not sure why they are fighting. Many soldiers fought bravely and believed in the US cause in Vietnam, but many did not. In 1971 the Armed Forces Journal published a report stating that the morale, discipline and battle-worthiness of the US troops in Vietnam was very low. It reported that individual units had avoided or refused combat, troops were drug-ridden or dispirited and officers were being killed by their own troops.